Cut Customer Service? You’ll Lose Customers – Scott Anthony – HarvardBusiness.org.
Another great articleby Scott Anthony.
I’ve clearly stated my perspective that the worst thing companies can do in the Great disruption is to stop investing in innovation. Companies might think that innovation and survival are discrete choices. They are not. Companies that stop innovating are sowing [...]

Marketing Tips for Twitter.
Snagged this article off a tweet from my CEO Chucky P.  It makes some good points…
1 – First and foremost, you need to know the difference between posting often and spamming.
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Image by luc legay via Flickr

Found this on Mashable the other day – “10 Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired”
I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not, but I think its something to read.  I’ve been involved in VERY interesting job”stuff” recently and in the past.  I think these [...]

I was reading this post from a new blog I found tonight called Employee Evolution – post from Fortune Mag tonight.

I got to thinking – if I’m ever put in charge of a company, not sure that will ever happen, but if I do…I think I’ll really strive for this.  I’m not sure how it would work – but I think the building blocks are just having happy people working there.

Now happy is not really enough – that have to be happy, passionate people.  But if you have those two things – I’m not sure how you can lose.  Because the passionate, happy people I know are wonderful.

They get so much done and are so much more productive that the non-happy, or worse non-passionate ones.  The worst kind are passion people in a bad place, I’ve been there too many times.

Passionate, non-happy people are destructive.  Why?  They have gangs.  What? Gangs?  Yes, these are people who have charisma and a posse.  They can undermine forward progress quicker than you can imagine.  And it’s the worst kind of destructive – it is deep and wide.

So, if you come across a company I am running someday – look for the one with casual day every day and ping pong tables in the lobby.  We don’t need no stinking lobby – but we do need ping pong tables.

For the last few months I’ve been on the WordPress train.  This is a pretty big step from my background as an ASP.NET programmer.  I know,and trust me – the nightmares came back when I found out php was TOO much like classic asp. 

Why WordPress?  I think it is a brilliant platform.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  From the elegance and completeness of the platform to the insane dedication of the community…it’s comm-plee-teet.  And please do not get me started on the plugins.  It took me a month to find something no one else had built yet to learn how to build one?

So what…you like it Tom, ok – I get it.

That brings us to iowa.com.  I work at Gazette Communications in the WebDev group.  We’ve been working with a team of   are trying to break free of the traditional media ties and begin to make new roads (at least of old media people) on the “internets”.

There are many plans laid for what iowa.com will be – basically they can be put into two categories:  content or engine.  The engine part is most exciting for me – we have a calendar engine, a blogging engine and a few more which we have to keep under wraps for a bit.  This is very cool and it is letting the WebDev geeks get some kung-fu going, but that is not the part that has me worried.

It’s the content that worries me.  Yea – content.  Why, we’ll it was my suggestion we used WordPress in setting up the site.  Then I had another brilliant idea – enter all content into the site as pages, I hope that one doesn’t come back to haunt me.  I only figured out a month later that pages in WordPress cannot be categorized.  (Now, in perfect WP community fashion – there is a solution to this problem.)

So here we are – the site is pushing 125 pages now…I used to think think that was big, but then I realized this site has 300+ posts.  If things get nutty – we can always leverage WP-Cache, and that should solve any of the serving issues.

I’ll keep you up to date – just keep me informed if you take a look at the site…please be honest.  Also – I’m looking to talk to anyone else who is using WordPress as a CMS and hopefully with some fairly significant traffic.

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This is a great post about textures in web design.  Hey – most people’s bandwidth is up, let’s make things look nice.

If you look around at well-designed websites in CSS galleries or any other source of design inspiration, you’ll see that texture is extremely common in modern Web design. One of the reasons it’s so popular is because of its versatility. Textures can be used in countless different ways and in a wide variety of design styles. As you look around, you’ll see how textures can be used in so many different ways by Web designers.

This gives me flashbacks of 1998 when every design the “creative team” gave us had gradiants and multi-colored background.  We’d smile, tell them how cool it was and then undo-it when we got back to the bat cave.

They would question it when they’d look at the finished product – but we would just tell them it was just the crappy PC screen…it would look much cooler when they got back up stairs to thir mac! 

I have a ton of ideas – most of them are just plain nuts.  But when I rea this post from andydrish.com – I got mad.  I had this idea about 1 1/2 years ago – and don;t et me wrong, I know it wasn’t revolutionary at the time…but it’s the point.

Here’s an opportunity that any twenty-something should be checking out… Ramit Sethi is giving away $2500 to a twenty-something with an entrepreneurial idea.   I started reading Ramit about a month ago.   He’s a genuine guy that is truly interested in helping others reach their dreams.

This scholarship is looking for someone with past entreprenurial experiences, a socially innovative idea, and lots of passion.   The winner will get a one time donation of $2500 and Ramit will mentor them as their projects begins to grow.

What I really want is a better way to track my brainstorms, I need to find a guy who knows flash.  I know of a cool wiki plaform which had a killer API and would work perfectly.

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OK – so about a month ago I posted a concept about how to use Wordpress as a DAM (Digital Asset Management system).  I felt pretty good about things – but have been thinking about it more and more lately.

I think some of the magic missing was the extra contetual and semantic stuff.  Here is a revised plan which may help with that.

Free DAM

The concept leverages a WordPress plugin which will go out and “harvest” content called WP-O-Matic.  It can be used for the dark side, but we’re using it from the white hat side – only for good.  It allows you to setup campaigns which can go out and get summaries. We will need to modify the plugin to grab complete articles, again – this is only valid for content we own the rights to…stealing content is bad.

After the content grab, we need to get some more context – this is where we leverage the open calais project.  (I still cannot pronounce that!)  They have a web service which can take a feed and add come back with extra goodness.

The OpenCalais Web service analyzes text and provides semantic data such as:

• Names of persons mentioned in the text
• Names of companies mentioned in the text
• Events described in the text such as bankruptcies and mergers

The results of the analysis can later be used to evaluate the text, by humans or machines. For example, a person interested in news stories relating to a specific merger, might find the Open Calais semantic analysis useful in determining the relevance of a specific article.

Then we move to open project #2 – one of my all time favs, Zemanta.  (I’m been a fan of these guys for awhile – Andreaz and the crew have got a great thing going and I applaud them when ever I can.)  So we run the new feed through Zemanta’s API and we get the tags and cats.

Then you add it to the WordPress DAM and bada-boom, we’re storing content.  The next steps will come later – when we add a plugin for users on Wordpress, Drupal and others for easy insertion into their new creations.

OK – let me know, are we moving forward, sideways or off base all together?

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